Tablet Wave Means Few Will Succeed, Many Will Fail

LAS VEGAS -- Every year at CES, there's a theme or expectation that quickly becomes codified the moment you step inside the cavernous and often soulless Las Vegas Convention Center. This year, it was clear that everyone and their grandmother was coming out with a tablet PC.

Pre-show estimates put the number of tablet introductions at around 50. Scuttlebutt inside Central Hall here put that figure closer to 80, although an exact count would be a near-Herculean and mind-numbing task.

What is painfully obvious is that many tablet makers showing off their wares are second-tier players, and will be drubbed by giants like Apple, Samsung, Motorola, RIM and maybe a couple of other fortunate ones. For tablets, 2011 is going to be a gruesome battle of attrition amongst dozens of companies.

"The market will only bear so much," said IDC analyst David Daoud before CES kicked off. "It's going to get pretty ugly as the year goes on."

And with so many options out there to pick from, it's going to be up to manufacturers to separate themselves with unique features. Let's look at who some of the major players of 2011 might be.

Photo: Erik Malinowski/Wired.com

More Bang for Your Buck

Of course, there's no shame in being a manufacturer that specializes in providing decent consumer electronics at a wallet-friendly price.

Indeed, Vizio has built a hugely successful TV business on just such a business model. Now the company is planning to release its own tablet. And while the market will bear such a player, it's been hard to find a well-rounded budget tablet we think that consumers will jump for.

Coby has lined up its Kyros slate of six Android tablets that it hopes will be a boon for those trying to save their shekels for other gizmos. With 7-, 8- and 10.1-inch screen sizes, Coby will offer features like Android 2.3 and 1080p HD in tablets for as low as $200. (Biggest drawback: All six models will come with only 4 GB of onboard Flash storage.)

Then there's RCA's RC-2210, which will run Android 2.2 on top of a 1-GHz Nvidia Tegra T20 chip, while saving your stuff on 32 GB of storage. The setback here is that only two countries have approved the device: Brazil and Paraguay. Obviously, the RCA rep I spoke with says he hopes to be cleared for U.S. sales sometime in 2011.

Believe it or not, Polaroid may come the closest to balancing price with features — sort of. The two tablets are actually re-branded Matsunichi tablets, in both 7- and 9.7-inch sizes. The TC 970 (seen above) and its smaller TC 700 will both sport Android 2.2, an ARM Cortex-A8 core chip, 7.5 hours of video playback on a single charge, built-in GPS, Wi-Fi tethering and a 2-megapixel camera. Both models are slated for a March release in the United States.

Photo: Erik Malinowski/Wired.com

Making Your Own Mark

A lot of tablet manufacturers translates to a lot of choices for operating systems. Many lower-price tablets are launching with either Android 2.2 or 2.3. HP (we're guessing) and RIM will show off their own in-house operating systems, and Motorola hopes to be the early leader of Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, when their unit is released.

But then there's Windows, as always. For devoted Microsoft users, Lenovo has positioned itself to be a Windows 7 market leader among tablets with its IdeaPad Slate (a temporary name) that's due out in early spring. It's got a 32-GB solid-state drive, dedicated panels for separating Work and Play apps, and 10.1-inch screen, as well as 6 hours of estimated battery life for web browsing.

The Kno, which sports a mammoth 14.1-inch screen and comes in both single- and dual-screen versions, is geared toward the educational set. The company found that 97 percent of college textbooks would fit without cramping on a screen of that size, and that's what the Kno offers in a unique manner. The user interface is smarter than you'd expect from a startup, with tools for scribbling notes in the margins as well as the ability to wirelessly purchase textbooks at prices 25 to 50 percent lower than brick-and-mortar stores. The Kno (which started shipping a couple of weeks ago) could easily stand apart in a sea of consumer-oriented tablets.

Panasonic has taken yet another route with their Viera Tablet (seen above), available in 4-, 7-, and 10-inch sizes. Basically, it's a standard Android 2.3-powered tablet except that it's optimized with an app that runs Panasonic's Viera Connect, which runs the company's new line of web-connected TVs. From there, you can pull up any number of online services, including Skype, Twitter, Hulu Plus and Netflix. Though pricing has not been finalized, it's hard to imagine why anyone would go for the 4-inch model, which merely resembles a phone that doesn't make phone calls.

The Panasonic and Kno models are, at the every least, proof of concept for the myriad possibilities that we know tablet PCs inherently possess. Whether these specialized ones ultimately survive long-term remains to be seen.

Photo: Erik Malinowski/Wired.com

Back to the Future

Ultimately, for the majority of consumers, tablet purchases will come down to things like brand loyalty, reliability, performance and user interface. RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook succeeds with its multitasking speed and camera functionality. The iPad has a legion of Apple devotees behind it, as well as sleek design and the best apps around. Motorola's Xoom could corner the Honeycomb market when it hits the streets. And one of several companies will emerge as the leader of the budget models.

Either way, it's expected that consumers will snatch up 55 million tablets in 2011, and the competition will be cutthroat. The majority of these new tablet offerings probably will not survive the year, and at next year's CES, some other trend — 3-D smartphones, anyone? — will no doubt dominate.

A sponge can only hold so much water. And before long, we'll surely see the over-saturated tablet industry start to get wrung out.